Rank competition and user costs steady on US App Store, reckons Fiksu

One of the problems of generating regular market data is separating the signal from the noise.

After all, for most of the time, most markets are stable.

The odd upwards or downwards movement is typically part of longer cycles; not significant in itself, but allowing analysts to be more accurate about the future.

That appears to be the take-home from the latest indices from mobile marketing outfit Fiksu.

Each month, it estimates the cost of acquiring a loyal US iPhone user; someone it defines as a user who will open an app three times or more.

They cost $1.36 in March 2013, up 7 cents from February.

What's more interesting, however, is that this price has been steady since November, excluding the Holiday season bump.

When it comes to the average aggregate volume of the daily downloads of the top 200 US free iPhone apps - Fiksu's App Store Competitive Index - it's been similarly strong (above 5 million since October's iPhone 5S launch: excluding November).

The result is March can be filed as business as usual for 2013.

Still, compared to March 2012, the Competitive Index is up 12 percent: a slow but steady increase.

"The 'new normal' continued in March, which was good news for mobile app marketers. Inventory has increased but costs have held steady, reflecting a maturity in the overall quality of apps and their ability to engage users," said Micah Adler, Fiksu's CEO.

Still, March wasn't normal for Fiksu itself, as its platform recorded its one hundred billionth app user action, and also revealed that it's driven more than one billion app downloads.

[source: Fiksu]